Talking shit and tearing stuff down is easy. Building something is hard.
We’re gonna recreate serfdom in the USA.
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
It's not the people's fault, it's the party's... the party thought everyone would just jump when told to do so.
Democrats deserve better.
I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.
There's been research on that [1]. They become even more likely to vote Republican. Here's the abstract:
> Who do citizens hold responsible for outcomes and experiences? Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed or significantly reduced their capacity since just 2010, leaving much of the rural U.S. without access to emergency health care. I use data on rural hospital closures from 2008 to 2020 to explore where and why hospital closures occurred as well as who–if anyone–rural voters held responsible for local closures. Despite closures being over twice as likely to occur in the Republican-controlled states that did not expand Medicaid, closures were associated with reduced support for federal Democrats and the Affordable Care Act following local closures. I show that rural voters who lost hospitals were roughly 5–10 percentage points more likely to vote Republican in subsequent presidential elections. If anything state Republicans seemed to benefit in rural areas from rejecting Medicaid and resulting rural health woes following the passage of the ACA. These results have important implications for population health and political accountability in the U.S.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-024-10000-8
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
So.
We collectively dismiss external criticism on flimsy rationales like there never being a military coup here, or even more amusingly “at least we can talk about it” as if that is good enough, or is unique to the US at all
In a nutshell that's why the South is so poor. They've been falling for this for generations.
Word up.
Most people that ever lived, lived under some authoritarian or unjust rule. Some lived in a full terror state. Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted. One can ponder, “what was the moment it all happened?” - there wasn’t a moment. It’s a total frog boiling in water situation. We’ve been boiling. Taste the water, it’s frog soup. Given that this admin has 3 more years, it’ll be frog bone broth once the bones melt.
It is so fucking crazy that if you actually let the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country. Anyway, I’m going back to my regular programming of watching Mexican farmers jump from buildings to their death as they run from ICE, and my president sell scam crypto and sneakers and shit.
Shout out to the American Dream.
In an era where Republicans are dismantling the government do you know what Dems will run on? That's right, dismantling the government, but in a kinder gentler way (see Ezra Kline's abundance agenda).
Dems are anemic to running on popular positions. Raise the minimum wage, expand Medicare, restore the institutions Republicans are dismantling.
Not that they're blameless, of course - they had four years to throw Trump in prison, did nothing, and now we're reaping the result. But the problem goes much deeper than the Dems being incompetent. In a functioning democracy, voters aren't supposed to elect someone who literally committed treason, just because the alternative is "unlikeable" (what the fuck does that even mean, next to Trump).
Yes - I can get the point you are making - “democracy for me but not for thee” is BS. Sure!
But the evidence is that theres one media network which is simply selling whatever story works, along side a 50+ year effort to kill trust in institutions. We can even show that the republican machinery gave up on bipartisanship - hell, it’s even public knowledge.
But that wouldn’t make a whit of a difference to voting patterns, or your point. Because your point doesn’t need to be based in the long history of complicated malfeasance that rots all English speaking democracies. It’s anchored in your current state and argument.
So yeah, people voted.
Biden had an identical border policy to Trump term 1. Dems even tried to strengthen ice towards the end of Biden's term.
The fact that you think he was weak on the border really shows that Dems trying to out Republican Republicans on the border is a bad move. They should have been pushing for immigration reform and better/faster routes to becoming documented.
> letting the woke crowd run rampant with their nonsense
What does this mean?
> selecting a VP that if ever tasked with running for President--wasn't likely to win.
That's pretty typical. The much bigger problem is Biden ran while knowing his polling was in the gutter. It was him running with sundowning symptoms.
Harris's problem was that while knowing about Biden's unpopularity, she refused to distance our distinguish herself from him in any way.
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
(2) If the left truly wanted to help the American people like they say they do they need the programs they enact to actually work. Say what you want about Trump but he is effective. But then again, all authoritarians are.
> Elections have consequences and now people are gonna have to live with it.
> People stayed home or decided to vote against their own interest.
the democrats need to clear out their decrepit leadership or its just gonna continue to slide worse and worse
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/congressional-democrats-favorabilit...
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3846305-democrats-have-a-messag...
it's ok if you don't have energy to understand otherwise rn, but please know that there's more to it than this. to understand is the only way out that's not total war.
and yes, i'm angry too.
> Dems are anemic to running on popular positions. Raise the minimum wage, expand Medicare, restore the institutions Republicans are dismantling.
So, one party puts up a person who encouraged and insurrection, has no coherent policy, ZERO moral standing, had security documents in a toilet, ran a crypto pump and dump scheme on the day of his inauguration, and wins.
But ALL of those things are not meaningful.
If one team comes to play football, and the other team brings in a posse of clowns who don’t play football, and the clowns win - then the game you are playing isn’t football. Hell, both teams should have fielded equally outrageous clowns. (This is what happens in completely corrupt nations, and America’s likely fate)
Playing a better game of football, is not as important as figuring out how the other team’s moves are legal.
In all earnestness - The question people really need to ask is not how the Dems lost, it’s how Trump ran in the first place.
And no matter who wins, the other side will be convinced it was by cheating. And that has no alternative but total war.
I have looked long and hard for an alternative but I'm not seeing one.
What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda? If that belief is widespread, is an action like this seen not as 'destruction', but as 'dismantling a biased system', even if it seems counterproductive to the rest of us?
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
It's what has created the behavior where Dems try to win over right wing independents because that's a more donor friendly position and Republicans can purely pander to their based, because they're already donor friendly (you know, for example, Republicans will always act to the benefit of big oil).
But it is wrong to think all American generations before ours didn't have to fight. The lie is that democracy was ever easy. There are millions of Americans mobilizing, sharing their stories, marching, talking to their representatives, protesting, and following their conscience. It is easier than ever to find and join the peaceful opposition.
That's the process.
Even on hacker news I frequently see people completely misunderstanding how, for instance, scientific research gets funded in the US. And the readership of this site is far more likely than a random sample of Americans to know about scientific research.
Dismantling chunks of the government based on the ignorance of some portion of the electorate is just bad policy.
It's comments like yours that make it really seem like the Democrat Party hasn't learned a damn thing from this ordeal.
Or for that matter, how is she less disconnected than Donald Trump, who bragged about being able to get away with sexually assaulting people because he's famous?
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"
11% said yes or were unsure.
That's from 2013, so I can't even begin to imagine what a poll from today would look like.
They do, but it’s not a belief they came upon accidentally. It was pushed over decades using billions of dollars and multiple media conglomerates.
> It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper. As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
I assume that mathematics will become "politicized" very soon.
Please note that this is not an attack on the parent, just an observation of what appears to be happening all around us.
What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
And it isn’t actually gone yet, either.
When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.
Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
And I know people like to play both sides so let me add. The big government hoopla exists only on one side.
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
See, this is a weasel word. Nobody said it was unpalatable, they said it was bad, because it is.
Do you want bad things to happen? No? Okay then, everyone should be on the same page.
There are limitations, but if a research arm was created purely by executive power, then it can be stopped through executive power.
The system works as intended.
SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
I agree that the Democrats are feckless, but still let's not forget which direction is up. (personally I think they're just coasting along and assuming they'll still be elites in whatever "new order" arises as long as they don't stick their heads up)
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.
Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
“In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said.
As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
If anyone doubts this, take a moment to read the document in one sitting. It’s remarkably short. Compare what you read to the government you’ve had all your life.
That's the core problem. The game is rigged
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
Was the prior system good? Was it great? If so, was it optimal? If not, what does better look like?
The discussion can splinter a thousand ways, and on HN it should as we seek truth.